This article was submitted to Frontiers in Evolutionary Psychology, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.
Received 2010 Jan 19; Accepted 2010 Feb 3.
Copyright © 2010 Kurzban.
This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
What we've got here is a failure to communicate
“Cool Hand Luke,” 1967
Shared Challenges
Researchers in evolutionary psychology face the same grand challenges as researchers who eschew the evolutionary approach in their own fields of study. Why, and when, do people behave altruistically? How do people make decisions, economic or otherwise, and what role do emotions play in decision-making? How do people choose their mates? How do people acquire information, from basic physical knowledge about objects and forces to important local knowledge about particular people and artifacts? How do these processes differ from – or resemble – learning processes among non-humans? How do the answers to all of these questions depend on properties of the individual, such as sex, life history phase, genetic endowment, developmental history, and context? And what are the physiological and neurophysiological substrates of the mechanisms that underlie all of these processes?
Evolutionary psychologists share these challenges with researchers from other disciplines because the field is not, of course, distinguished from others in terms of the domain of inquiry. Evolutionary psychologists study economic decision making [like economists], interpersonal and group dynamics [like social psychologists], cultural processes [like anthropologists], and endocrine effects [like physiologists].
The questions evolutionary psychologists ask are not only our questions, and the methodological hurdles we must overcome are faced by our colleagues with non- evolutionary approaches because we share the same toolkit, from ethnography to behavioral lab studies to neuroimaging.
What, then, are the challenges uniquely faced by evolutionary psychology?
Unique Challenges
I would argue that perhaps the field's greatest challenge lies less is coaxing nature to give up her secrets, and more in communicating the insights from evolutionary psychology to those outside the field.
Taking an evolutionary approach has elicited hostility from audiences since the field's inception. The story has frequently been told of the pitcher of water dumped on E.O. Wilson's head at a meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1978 [Segerstråle, 2000]. This incident can be seen in retrospect as a harbinger of things to come. While the water pitcher has been replaced by the written word, the level of discourse has not always improved. In addition to the political attacks on the field, whether from the left or the right [Segerstråle, 2000; Pinker, 2002], the scientific attacks are so strong that they include the charge that evolutionary psychology isn't even a science [Tattersall, 2001].
Indeed, antipathy for the view that doing psychology can be improved with the idea of evolved function has spawned an array of articles and books with more or less provocative titles, including allusions to the “Sins of Evolutionary Psychology” [Panksepp and Panksepp, 2000], a collection of Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology [Rose and Rose, 2000], Richardson's [2007] Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology, and so on.
Antagonism to the field takes the form of a deep skepticism about work that derives from its principles. Kenrick et al. [2005] report an anecdote in which a textbook author found that reviewers insisted he present criticisms of evolutionary research, but not of non-evolutionary research backed by less evidence. Conway and Schaller [2002] made similar observations, suggesting that it is in the context of evolutionary ideas that have consistently been subjected to and resisted falsification “that charges of nonfalsifiability and other declarations of disbelief are most often aired” [p. 154].
Indeed, the skepticism faced by evolutionary psychological hypotheses is stunning set against the credulousness with which other ideas are greeted. Baumeister and colleagues [e.g., Baumeister et al., 2007] have been advancing an Eighteenth century, pre-enlightenment notion that there is such a thing as “mental energy;” psychology's own phlogiston [c.f., Van den Berg, 1986]. This idea is absurd in the context of the computational theory of mind, but its absurdity does not seem to have slowed the pace of publication. From this, it can be inferred that ideas in psychology, even if they are fundamentally incompatible with known facts, don't arouse such skepticism as long as the idea don't derive from a systematic analysis of evolved function.
Daly and Wilson [2007] suggest that critics of the field “are not just skeptical, they are angry” [p. 396], and that the skepticism of their research agenda “appears to be motivated by something other than a humble search for the truth” [p. 390]. Critics’ anger translates into practices that ought to evoke scientific outrage. To take just one of many possible examples, Thornhill and Palmer [2000] wrote that “whether rape is an adaption or byproduct cannot yet be definitively answered” [p. 84], but their position has been consistently portrayed as the opposite, as Lloyd's [2001] claim that they “begin by assuming that rape is a single trait, and that this trait is an adaptation” [p. 1542, emphasis original]. A decade on, editors continue to allow authors to perpetuate this misrepresentation: Leiter and Weisberg [2010, p. 72] recently did so, ironically enough in the context of taking another author to task for misrepresentation1.
The Challenge of the Challenges
Debate and discussion are, of course, all to the good. Conflict helps distill truth, as champions make their cases for their favored proposition, allowing their views to be judged by observers.
The challenge faced by evolutionary psychology, however, is that the critics do not participate in this dialectic. Interlocutors engaging with evolutionary psychologists frequently don't engage with evolutionary psychology, preferring instead to fabricate evolutionary psychologists’ views, and then attack the imagined positions [see Kurzban, 2002].
Why is this the case? At this point it is unclear. A recent survey potentially illustrates one aspect of the problem. Park [2007] investigated 10 social psychology texts’ presentation of Hamilton's [1964] theory of kin selection. This is a good test case because kin selection is central to modern evolutionary biology and directly relevant to human social behavior [family and altruism], and, at least in its broad strokes, is not particularly difficult to master, deriving from one inequality with three terms [C?